It’s raining down ash in Southern California, after an Exxon Mobil oil refinery exploded. The blast nearly leveled a processing unit and left four contractors with minor injuries. The local Torrance Fire Department says gasoline is to blame. Meanwhile, the aftermath looks like a scene from Blade Runner.

17 December 2014

Although you might think that the North Pole is nothing but a barren wilderness populated only by polar bears and Santa, a surprisingly large number of countries are getting surprisingly bitchy about who owns it — mostly because of the oil underneath. Today, Denmark added its name to the list.

16 December 2014

Boom is a terrifying documentary on a problem that you may not be aware of: America has been invaded by hundred of thousands of moving fire bombs — freight trains with old, cheap tanker cars designed to transport corn oil filled with dangerous flammable oil. Logically, accidents are happening, people are dying and oil is spilling.

23 November 2014

Despite all the efforts to the contrary, it’s an uncomfortable truth that our world mostly still runs on oil, made from dead little creatures and pumped from under the ocean. So a machine that could generate oil, without the need for drills or rigs or pipelines, just by combining hydrogen and CO2, sounds quite attractive.

29 October 2014

It’s over four years since Deepwater Horizon went belly up — but the whereabouts of two million barrels of oil that burst out from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico has remained a mystery. Now, a team of scientists believe they have found it.

15 July 2014

Few artists in the world have the perfect command of lighting, colour, and oil media technique of Yigal Ozeri. His always sensual and sometimes disturbing hyperrealistic art — which usually focuses on women in dreamy and contemplative states — is simply stunning. Warning: Some paintings are NSFW.

9 April 2014

A coalition of 100 investors announced plans to build a “Chinese-controlled economic zone” populated by skyscrapers and luxury residences. Their new city will be in Kenya, but the goal is to “match the glamour of Dubai”. What would motivate investors to go to the trouble of building a massive new city in a country other than their own? It’s pretty simple, actually.

7 April 2014

The world’s ever-growing demand for gas is driving companies deeper and further into the ocean to drill for it. And, to do so, they’re building a new type of ship: small city-sized floating factories that drill, process, refine and barrel gas while still out on the open sea. Think of them as one-stop gas shops that, crucially, can operate in international waters.

30 March 2014

A quarter-century ago, after the Exxon Valdez’s captain downed one too many drinks and left a third mate in charge, the oil tanker struck a reef and bled 41,640 kilolitres of oil across 2092km of Alaska’s coastline. But the catastrophic oil spills have continued in the US — and it’s still not prepared to handle them.